Chistoph Büchel’s “Training Ground for Democracy”

Chistoph Büchel’s work entitled “Training Ground for Democracy” has found itself altered and expanded due to the legal processes which were incurred due to the difficulties the artist and the gallery had with each other.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams won the lawsuit against Büchel, and won the right to exhibit Büchel’s incomplete work, which he had stopped progress on as the artist-gallery relationship grew more and more acrid. When the artist community balked at the thought of an unfinished work presented to the public without the artist’s consent, Mass MoCa relented and dismantled “Training Ground,” which had been housed in a warehouse before the lawsuit commenced.

Today, “Training Ground” has leaked out of the warehouse and now includes an exhibition of the legal correspondence between the lawyers, museum officials, and the artist himself. Fueled by rage over the destruction of his art piece, as Büchel claims Mass MoCa has done by suing and later dismantling the installation, Christoph Büchel has expanded his art and taken it in a new direction and a new metaproject based on the ideals of free speech and freedom of expression.

Lies, Accusations, and Accounting

The trouble between Büchel and Mass MoCa includes the museum’s assertion that the artist was “difficult” to deal with, while Büchel maintains that MassMoCa lied about budgets.

Büchel, according to the New York Times, has investigated heavily into the accounting side of the museum, familiarizing himself with budget concerns and endowment issues to an extreme degree. It would seem that the ongoing battle between the artist and gallery has brought the artist further from his art as he gets bogged down in the bureaucracy of art exhibition, rather than concerning himself with the tenets of its creation.

Read the full New York Times article here.